Blog Archives

Over the past year and a half, we’ve hosted two campus workshops on team-based learning, also called TBL. Bill Roberson of the University at Albany does a great job on getting your buy-in on the method, and many folks, including one entire department, have implemented it extensively at UTC. TBL is much more than “group work”; it is a strategy on which you plan your entire course. There are…

Brad Reynolds and Tom Wilson received a Beyond the Classroom ThinkAchieve grant to fund an experiential learning activity in a general education non-laboratory science course. During fall 2012, students in Bio/ESC 1100 (Conservation of Biodiversity) were given the option to participate in a hands-on field experience and reflection activity in lieu of taking the final exam in the course. Instead of just listening to a professor talk about conservation,…

The Seven Principles By: Dawn M. Ford It was in 1987 when Chickering and Gamson wrote about the seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. Years later, those principles still hold up, so it’s good to review them every now and again to keep us fresh. Principle one is that contact between students and faculty should be encouraged. It’s important that students know that faculty care about them. …

If you attended the Instructional Excellence Retreat in May, you heard about – and hopefully learned something about – the concept of critical reflection. Patti Clayton, a Senior Scholar with the Center for Service and Learning at IUPUI, ushered us through the process of critical reflection before, during, and after an experiential learning opportunity to generate, deepen, and document our learning about the experience. Critical reflection was the focus…

It’s almost that time again – the first day of class. I have sometimes struggled with what to do the first day; do I dive right in or just cover the syllabus and let the students go? The literature tells us that the first day of class is important, if not critical, to the success of a course and the students. The first day sets the tone because students…